Ed Henning

A few people who have called me recently to discuss PC problems reminded me of just what I look for in the ideal operating system.

Despite its dominance in this area, Microsoft has been relatively weak at creating the ideal: a useable, manageable, understandable and easily navigable filing system.

For those of us who have been using PCs for many years, the filing system presents few problems, but for many newer users it is a great barrier.

In fact, even for the more experienced users, the sheer size of modern hard drives and the quantity of data they often hold are causing problems of data management. But in my view, my data is the single most important feature of my PC; it is the very reason the PC exists.

If we step back a few years, you may remember when Microsoft, making a point about Windows 95, hoped that the new system would encourage people to use more applications, both at the same time in a multitasking environment, but also in the general sense of using a greater variety of applications.

This has certainly happened, but in my opinion a more important factor has been the increase in processor speeds, enabling us to use more complex types of data.

I could go on about how the evolution of the PC is best described by the data types we have been using, but that's for another time.

A consequence of us using a greater number of applications is that we now have a much greater variety of data files on our hard drives, stored in many different places, many of them taking up significant space due to their complexity.

The features in the operating system to help users manage and keep track of all this data have nowhere near kept up with this change.

Microsoft has made a reasonably good fist of organising and managing applications, perhaps because this has been an easier problem to tackle.

However, it has also made something of a mess with the haphazard placement, and often replacement, of dynamic link libraries (DLLs).

The system is a disgrace, and is simply baffling to most users, who would rather never even hear of a DLL, let alone know whether to delete one.

What is a non-technical user, when removing or changing some application, expected to do when told that a file is about to be removed but that other applications may not work properly afterwards?

Of course, the file gets left there, and yet more garbage is left on the hard disk eating up space and creating more of a mess.

There is a similar, but much larger problem, with data. It is the nature of things that the greater profusion of items there are, the more difficult they become to manage.

The more an increasing quantity of data is spread in different places on a disk in different formats, the more easily we make mistakes or wrong decisions

And as far as hard disk space is concerned, the cheaper anything becomes, the less careful and discriminating we are with it.

The huge quantity of data actually can become an obstacle to achieving what we really want, and when a problem strikes, the results can be impossible to reverse.

And, of course, any error is bound to occur at the most inconvenient of times, and inevitably when you have just let a few days go by without your regular main backup.

Now, I don't want to get rid of the data, or reduce its variety, but it does need better management. The larger the hard drive, the worse the housekeeping problems become, but few of us get in a regular housekeeping habit.

My contention is that we need much more help from operating system writers and application developers. Linux is no better in this respect, but its problems are different.

Some of the latter do not seem to have progressed much beyond the days in the 1980s when some applications would only install onto one drive: C.

Many now do let a user choose the target directory for data. One piece of software I like in this respect is a free suite, Software602 (www.software602.com).

Among its many good features is the fact that it will always go back to the last directory in which you saved something. A simple touch which makes a huge difference to absent-minded humans.

Many application writers do not seem to take into consideration the fact that users use other vendors' applications as well.

Where any commonality is concerned, the operating system should set the lead, and to a limited extent Windows does, but Microsoft's ideas such as 'My Documents' seem half-hearted.

For a start, if you were an application developer, would you use something like that for your data location? Could you feel confident that it will still be there in the next version of the operating system?

Microsoft likes few things better than seeing a set of goal posts and then moving them. In one of the phone calls I received recently I was asked about how to send an image as an attachment. 'How do I get it out of the image software and into the email?'

It seems so simple when you know how, and the right grammar helps, but there are countless users out there with similar problems and misunderstandings.

It is about time that Microsoft and others tackled these problems properly. Over the years they have learned about the concept of usability, but manageability should be just as big a focus.

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